Fiction Review: The Audacity

Every spring, my mom and I travel to Vermont to attend Booktopia, a wonderful bookish weekend hosted by the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester that combines about 8-9 authors and 100 or so readers for book discussions, meals, games, and a lot of fun! (tickets still available; my recap/vlog from Booktopia 2023) We'll be attending Booktopia next weekend! So, every year at this time, I try to read as many books as I can that will be featured at the event. One of those is The Audacity, a unique satirical novel that I enjoyed.

Guy Sarvananthan was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated with his parents to the U.S. as a child. He went to a music conservatory for college, where he became a decent, middling composer. Victoria Stevens, a hard-driving, highly motivated woman plucked Guy out of obscurity by marrying him. She started PrevYou, a Theranos-type company that created self-serve health booths, located in cities everywhere, to collect data with the simple aim of nothing less than curing cancer. Guy now runs the philanthropic arm of her multi-billion-dollar company. He comes home from yet another charity gala one night to discover that Victoria is missing and possibly presumed dead, until he finds out from her board that the news is about to break that the company has failed at its mission and the whole thing (and Victoria) is a fraud. Knowing his wife, Guy quickly realizes she disappeared intentionally to ride out the media storm, but he's hurt and stunned that she didn't include him in her plan. Devastated and betrayed and realizing his life of luxury is about to end, Guy accepts an invitation (that was actually for Victoria) to a private island. It's an event, called The Summit, hosted by a billionaire for the world's wealthiest people (not the top 1% but the top 0.001%) to solve the world's problems! Guy has no interest in the weekend's grand aims; his goal is to try to forget what is happening (and about to happen) to him and go out with a bang.

The satire here is thick, right from the opening scene at that charity gala in New York, where the attendees are all bored with the extravagance that surrounds them  (some of those same people are invited to the island). If you saw Murder at the End of the World on Hulu, this gathering is a lot like that one, only even more decadent. I generally prefer my satire in smaller doses, like short stories or essays, but this novel grew on me. It has a lot of humor, especially in the second half. While the focus is on Guy, the betrayed spouse, Victoria gets her own chapters where her driven, productivity-obsessed approach to rebranding herself is also skewered. This novel is not for the faint of heart, and I know that at least one of my Booktopia buddies really hated it. There is a lot of hard drinking, drugs, and sex in the novel--that's pretty much Guy's goal, to just obliterate reality and block out what's happening to him. So, if that sort of thing offends you, this is probably not the book for you. But it is a very smart, clever satire, and I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to meeting the author next week!

288 pages, Soho Press

HighBridge audio (a division of Recorded Books)

This book fits in the following 2024 Reading Challenges:

 

Travel the World in Books (unnamed private tropical island!)
 

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible.

 

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Fiction Review: The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

On audio, I finished another Big Book, The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man by Jonas Jonasson. This was a sequel to The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, and I did not read the first book, but that was OK. This unusual novel is hard to describe, but it was very entertaining.

 Allan is the 100-year-old man of the title, and at the start of the novel, he is relaxing in Bali with his friend, Julius, a petty thief. They are both Swedish, and seem to have come into some money at the end of the first book because they are living a life of luxury in Bali. When their money begins to run out, Julius makes a new friend and comes up with a money-making asparagus-farming/importing business scheme. For Allan’s 101^st birthday, Julius hires a hot-air balloon, but the two friends crash-land in the ocean. They are picked up by a North Korean ship coming from the African coast and carrying four kilograms of refined uranium. They end up in North Korea as “guests”/prisoners of Kim Jung-un, with Allan pretending to be a nuclear weapons expert! That’s just the first of the many surprising, outlandish adventures the two friends have together. They travel all over the globe, pick up a third person, get into crazy situations, and somehow manage to escape each time, culminating in a happy ending for all.

 

As you can probably tell just from that brief description, the novel is aptly titled, and Allan and Julius have a lot of adventures. In fact, the chapters are labeled with the countries they are visiting, and there are a lot of different ones included here. I learned a lot about each country and its history! Allan is quite a character who says whatever he is thinking, has plenty of opinions, and, in this book, has discovered technology in the form of a tablet and is constantly regaling his companions with the latest news, whether they want to hear it or not. Besides Kim Jung-un, Allan meets President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (and has opinions about them all!). The book is light and funny and often outrageous. But the novel is also filled with facts (and hilarious commentary) about world history and current global events, since Allan has lived through much of history and now has his tablet at hand. It's quirky and sometimes absurd, but it is also fascinating, entertaining, and very funny.  It was a fun change of pace, sandwiched in between a post-apocalyptic audio book and a mystery/thriller. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it on audio.

 

448 pages, William Morrow

HarperAudio

 

Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.

 

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!

 

Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, as the Korean War and the current state of North Korea are explained as background for Allan's current adventures there, and/or download it from Audible.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

   
  

Or you can order The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Fiction Review: Catch-22

I have wanted to read the WWII classic Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for years, but the story of how I actually read it stretches across two summers! I began it last year for my annual Big Book Summer Challenge and struggled with it. I set it down after a couple of weeks, thinking I would pick it up again, and ... it sat on my bookcase for another year. This summer, I picked it up again for Big Book Summer and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it very much and finished it easily. Here's the scoop on what's it about, what I struggled with, and what I ended up liking.

Set on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea during WWII, Catch-22 is focused on a U.S. Army Air Squadron. John Yossarian is at the center of the novel, though most of the rest of the squadron have a voice and a story to tell as well. The central conflict in the novel is that one crazy colonel keeps raising the required number of missions for the men. Every time one of them gets close to meeting the requirements and going home, the colonel raises the number of required missions again. Yossarian tries to get sent home on the basis of being crazy, but Catch-22 states that any man who says he is crazy and doesn't want to fly any more missions is proving that he's sane because no sane man would want to fly more dangerous missions. (This novel invented the now well-known term catch-22.) Scenes move from the camp, with tents and officer's club (picture M*A*S*H), to being on leave in Rome to the hospital, where Yossarian spends quite a bit of time trying to get sent home, to some very tense and sobering bombing flights. Through it all, Yossarian is trying to get sent home (by the end of the novel, the required flights has gradually been raised from 40 to 80) and is overwhelmed by the absurdities and madness that surround him.

This is a comic-tragic novel that mixes humor with the horrors of war, sometimes on the same page. When I started reading the book last summer, that uneven tone threw me. I had heard it was funny--and it is--but was put off by the juxtaposition of horrifying war scenes and people dying with humor. When I picked it back up this summer, I was more prepared and had come to recognize that that is the novel's intention: to highlight the absurdities of war by combining the two very different tones: again, think M*A*S*H, which accomplished that same purpose very well. While reading the second half of the novel (with a list of characters by my side to help keep them straight) this summer, I was able to better appreciate how it met this goal. I could be laughing out loud at some farcical scene on one page and sobered by the death of a dozen men on the next. So, I get it now, and I could recognize the genius in that approach, which was revolutionary when the novel was first released in 1955. One other negative, though, remained; the novel is quite misogynistic. The only female characters are whores and nurses (who are sexualized). This is, perhaps, understandable for a WWII novel set during battletimes, perhaps a product of its time as well, and I suspect it was part of its unorthodox approach to try to shock readers, but it was still disturbing to me at times. Other than that, I ended up enjoying the novel, appreciating its groundbreaking approach, and am glad that I finally finished it. I also enjoyed reading some of the end matter, including letters and essays from Heller himself, which provided more insights into the novel's intent and how it came to be.

453 pages, Simon & Schuster

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the start of the novel in a funny scene where Yossarian is censoring letters home, and/or download it from Audible.

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Fiction Review: Tales from the Inner City

I struggled with how to categorize Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan, a wholly unique book. Graphic novel? Not really. Teen/YA? Well, yes, but not just for that age group. I finally settled on "illustrated short stories," but that still is just the tip of the iceberg. Tan, well known for his drawings, wordless books, films, and illustrations, has created something that defies description but is beautiful, thoughtful, and engrossing...so now I'll try to describe it!

This large hardcover book contains 25 short stories, each set in a city and focused on a particular type of animal and how it intersects with humans, often in a futuristic or fantastical world. Each of these stories is accompanied with large, 2-page color-saturated paintings, sometimes just one per story and sometimes many of them. Some stories are just a few paragraphs long, some are two pages, and some go one for longer. Every story is magical, bizarre, and strange, immersing the reader in worlds that are often similar to but different than our own. There is a wide range to the subject matter: dogs' relationships to their human companions through the ages (the most realistic one); a sudden appearance of countless butterflies blanketing a city on an ordinary day; a family in a large city that fishes from the top of their building into the air and one night catches a huge, rare fish; a board meeting where all the members suddenly turn into frogs. My favorite story involves bears hiring lawyers. They are all enchanted stories accompanied by similarly dreamlike paintings.

A sample painting from the opening pages of Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan.

The stories are all very thoughtful...and thought-provoking, commenting not only on the relationships between humans and animals but also humans' relationship to the earth and to each other. Sometimes, I was nodding along and could clearly see the author's point, though other stories left me slightly puzzled...but no less captivated. The paintings are all so gorgeous and colorful that they beg to be lingered over and studied. In fact, I realized that as I've been writing this review with the book next to me, I keep rubbing my hand over the cover and the breath-taking illustrations - it's just that kind of book. I see that Amazon has categorized the book under Teen/YA, and I do think it will appeal to many in that age group, but some of the stories have deep meaning and themes that will probably be more apparent (or not!) to adults. I would only recommend the book for younger kids if an adult is pre-reading it and selecting certain stories to read aloud because some of them have an element of violence or gruesomeness. It is really an illustrated book of surreal and provocative fantasy short stories for adults - in other words, in a category all its own. It is endlessly fascinating and well worth a look - or two or a hundred.

224 pages, Arthur A. Levine Books

Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

You can purchase Tales from the Inner City from an independent bookstore, either locally or online, here:

Or you can order Tales from the Inner City from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Fiction Review: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

In an effort to try to read last year’s Christmas gifts before Christmas came around again, I recently read Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris, a slim novel of unique short stories that my husband gave me last year. I wish I hadn’t waited so long! This book is completely different than anything else Sedaris has written but still features his trademark sense of humor and absurdity.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a series of brief stories about animals behaving like people, and Sedaris uses this vehicle to satirize various human behaviors in a way that is incredibly clever and often hilariously funny. For instance, the title story is about a squirrel and a chipmunk who are dating, much to the dismay of their families and friends. The first weeks of their courtship are exciting and passionate, until they realize they have little in common:

“The squirrel and the chipmunk had been dating for two weeks when they ran out of things to talk about. Acorns, parasites, the inevitable approach of autumn: these subjects had been covered within their first hour; and so breathlessly, their faces flushed. Twice they had held long conversations about dogs, each declaring an across-the-board hatred of them and speculating on what life might be like were someone to put a bowl of food in front of them twice a day. “They’re spoiled rotten is what it comes down to,” the chipmunk had said, and the squirrel had placed his paw over hers, saying, “That’s it exactly. Finally, someone who really gets it.”

Sedaris builds these stories so cleverly, often combining a well-known animal characteristic with some nugget of human behavior with hysterical results. I laughed out loud in the doctor’s office (much to my son’s embarrassment) while reading the story about the mother stork who doesn’t know what to say when her child asks where babies come from! Then there is the Irish Setter, known for loyalty, who stays with his wife even though she is a mixed breed with a foul mouth who has cheated on him with the English bulldog across the street.  Adding to the fun are illustrations by Ian Falconer whom I recognized as the illustrator of the acclaimed Olivia picture books the moment I saw his drawing of a pot-bellied pig. I just loved the satire and ingenuity of these stories!

Another story features a baboon hairdresser who is gossiping while grooming a cat, the migrating songbirds who brag (and complain) endlessly to their friends about their annual trip down to Central America, and the lab rat who believes all illness is caused by a negative attitude, right up until she is injected with AIDS (as someone who lives with a chronic illness, I especially liked that one). I kept imagining Sedaris encountering various boorish behaviors among the human race and translating them to the animal kingdom in these stories. I thoroughly enjoyed this slim volume of very clever and very funny stories that are wholly unique. Lots of fun.

168 pages, Back Bay Books

Fiction Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Last night, I had a wonderful experience attending an event sponsored by my local bookstore, Hockessin Bookshelf. It is a book discussion group called Eat, Drink, Read, held at a local shop owned by a chef. The chef cooks dinner for the group – a dinner based on the book! – and the participants discuss the book while enjoying their meal. It was a fabulous evening – great company, good discussion, and amazing food, a winning combination. The book we discussed last night was Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, and everyone enjoyed both the book and the discussion (and the dinner!).

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a completely unique novel filled with hilarious satire yet also warmth.  The entire novel is told through a wide variety of media, including e-mails sent between the characters, letters, receipts, and other documents. Bernadette is the mother of a daughter, Bee, who is in 8^th grade in a small private school in Seattle. Having moved from L.A. twenty years ago, Bernadette has still not acclimated to life in the Pacific Northwest. She’s something of a shut-in, avoiding interacting with other people as much as possible, though she clearly loves Bee and is a good mother to her.

Bee’s husband, Elgie, is a big shot at Microsoft (a rock star who gave the 4^th most popular TED talk ever, as one of his admirers gushes), working in its iconic Seattle campus where he clearly does feel at home. Elgie, Bernadette, and Bee live in a ramshackle building on a hill that used to be a girls’ reform school. Under Bernadette’s neglect, the house is falling apart, but she has a new approach to life – she has hired herself a virtual assistant in India who does everything for her from arranging for yard work to making a dinner reservation to ordering her prescriptions (we all agreed last night that we’d like our own virtual assistants!).

We know from the first page of the novel that Bernadette disappeared two days before Christmas, so all of these various documents that make up the novel go back and gradually fill in the blanks as to what happened in the weeks and months (and years) leading up to this upsetting event. Hearing from the different characters’ perspectives helps to slowly build a picture of who Bernadette is and what she’s done. Though her actions seem odd at first, learning about her past helps the reader to feel some empathy for Bernadette.

Plot summary alone doesn’t do this novel justice; what you can’t tell from this description is that this book is hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny and extremely clever.  Semple’s satire focuses, in turn, on the Pacific Northwest in general and Seattle in particular, Microsoft’s unique corporate climate, being a parent with school-age kids in today’s world, and even modern life in general. As a parent, I loved the satire about schools and over-involved parents and was laughing right from the very first page, where Bee’s report card shows that the worst grade a child at Galer Street School can get is a W for Working Toward Excellence!

Here’s how Bernadette describes Seattle in a letter to an old L.A. colleague:

“Greetings from sunny Seattle, where women are “gals,” people are “folks,” a little bit is a “skosh,” if you’re tired you’re “logy,” if something is slightly off it’s “hinky,” you can’t sit Indian-style but you can sit “crisscross applesauce,” when the sun comes out it’s never called “sun” but always “sunshine,” boyfriends and girlfriends are “partners,” nobody swears but someone occasionally might “drop the f-bomb,” you’re allowed to cough but only into your elbow, and any request, reasonable or unreasonable, is met with “no worries.”

Have I mentioned how much I hate it here?”

I wondered if this book would appeal mainly to parents of school-aged kids, but there were plenty of non-parents in the group last night who thoroughly enjoyed the satire also. While the humor in this novel is a big part of its attraction, that’s not all it has to offer; the novel  is also clever and warm and even a bit of a mystery. The author spotlights family relationships, using satire to deal with some very serious issues. Relationships between mother and daughter, between spouses, and between father and daughter are all explored here. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, as did all of our book discussion participants (I think the lowest rating out of 5 was a 3 and many gave it a 4 or 5). After such a unique, clever, and hilarious novel, I look forward to seeing what Semple comes up with next.

326 pages, Back Bay Books (Little, Brown & Company)

P.S. If you read the novel, do not skip over “Dear Mountain Room Parents” in the back, after the acknowledgments. This essay by Semple, originally published in The New Yorker, had me – and my husband – laughing hysterically. The phrase “nondenominational potato prints” still cracks us up!

P.P.S. Oh, and we heard last night, that this novel is being made into a movie! Semple herself is writing the screenplay, since she used to write for TV (Mad About You, Ellen, Arrested Development) before she became a novelist. Can't wait!